1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the manipulation and playback of electronic media content on the Internet. More particularly and without limitation, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for identifying and notifying users about electronic media content, based on biometric recognition.
2. Background Information
On the Internet, people usually discover and view multimedia and other electronic media content in one or more fundamentally different ways: keyword searching, browsing collections, selecting related content, and/or link sharing. One common way to browse a video collection is to display a list of images that the user can browse and click to watch the videos. A user interface may be provided to allow the user to narrow the displayed list by one or more criteria, such as by category, television show, tag, date produced, source, or popularity. User interfaces may also provide the ability for users to search for videos, or other electronic media.
The performance of video search engines can be evaluated by examining the fraction of videos retrieved that are relevant to a user query and the fraction of retrieved videos that are relevant to the user's need. The traditional way for enabling searching for video content is based on metadata for a video, such as title, description, tags, etc. There are two drawbacks with this approach. First, the metadata is usually quite limited and it only provides a very brief summary of a video. In addition, the metadata of a video may not be reliable or complete, especially for those videos from a user-generated video site, such as YouTube. For example, many videos from YouTube are in fact spam videos having metadata that has nothing to do with the content of the video.
Speech-to-text techniques may also be used to augment the metadata of a video and improve recall from a collection videos. Also, a popularity and/or collaborative filter may be used to improve precision. In addition, visual analysis to identify people or objects contained within a video can be used in some cases for both improved recall and precision. However, these techniques also have drawbacks. For example, analyzing the visual content of a video to identify people and objects is computationally resource intensive and often inaccurate. Also, using only visual analysis to identify people in a video can lead to unreliable or incomplete results because the video may contain still or moving images of a person with a voice over by a narrator.
Some video search services offer update/notification services to users, whereby users may enter requests, such as special queries, and receive notifications when new videos are posted in relation to those keywords. Such a service actively tracks new videos available online and selects videos based on a user's queries. It then sends a user notification about these new videos at user-specified times. However, such a service is substantially limited by its abilities to retrieve desired videos for a user based on the effectiveness of metadata, as described above. For example, if a new video is not properly tagged in relation to a person appearing and/or speaking in the video, then users may not receive the appropriate update. Biometric analysis of videos, including the identification of people based on biological features, provides accurate ways to identify video content. However, it has traditionally been too resource-intensive for use in characterizing large amounts of electronic media on the Internet.
As a result, users of the Internet may not timely discover and view the quantity or type of online content that they desire. Insufficient content can lead users to travel away from the content sites, which may result in an attendant decrease in website use and/or advertising revenue. As a corollary, the successful display and notification of electronic media content can be useful in attracting and retaining Internet users, thereby increasing use of a website and/or online advertising revenue.
As a result, there is a need for improved systems and methods for manipulating electronic media content. Moreover, there is a need for systems and methods for identifying and notifying users about electronic media content based on effective and efficient biometric recognition.